Lead Experience Designer

Join Thoughtworks at the beginning of our next chapter in the Middle East. KSA and the UAE are strategic growth markets for us, fueled by ambitious national agendas around AI, digital government, data, and economic transformation, such as Vision 2030. We are looking for an experienced Lead Experience Designer to join our fast-growing local team in Riyadh. As a Lead Experience Designer, you will be the creative force driving the definition and delivery of AI-powered products and experiences. Operating within small, fast-paced, multidisciplinary pods - collaborating shoulder-to-shoulder with Product Managers, Data/AI Specialists, and forward deployed engineers - you will lead end-to-end design from initial concept through to shipped products. This role combines hands-on interaction design, strategic client advisory, and foundational practice-building. You will shape how agentic AI systems behave, look, and feel while helping establish and scale local design capabilities and client relationships. Job Responsibilities • End-to-End Design Ownership: Lead experience design across all engagement phases. Facilitate discovery workshops, map complex user journeys, create mid-to-high fidelity concept visualisations, and build interactive prototypes. Design in parallel with engineering, testing with working prototypes rather than static handoffs. • AI-Native & Agentic UX: Shape conversational, multi-modal, and autonomous agent flows. Apply core principles of trust, transparency, and user control - surfacing AI reasoning appropriately, managing uncertainty, and setting responsible AI guardrails. • AI-Accelerated Practice: Leverage AI tools and platforms (such as Figma, UX Pilot, Bolt, Murai, Maze, and LLM research tools) to collapse ideation cycles and accelerate research without compromising craft or usability. • Lean User Research & Testing: Conduct lightweight generative and evaluative research that matches rapid sprint cycles. Champion accessibility, inclusive design, and continuous validation from day one. • Design Systems & Scalability: Build, evolve, and govern design systems and component libraries in close partnership with engineering to drive pod velocity and visual consistency. • Consultative Leadership & Advisory: Act as a trusted advisor to client executives, partnering with them to shape user experiences for ambitious AI-native products, data platforms, and complex digital transformations. Apply a consultative approach in pre-sales, helping shape engagements, creating proposals, and establishing our trusted footprint in the region. • Practice Building & Culture: Play a pivotal role in building our local Experience Design capability, influencing our multidisciplinary teams, establishing design culture, and shaping early client relationships in the Middle East. Job Qualifications Technical skills • 8+ years of experience in product design with a portfolio demonstrating exceptional visual design quality, strong UX reasoning, fast concept-to-prototype capability, and end-to-end ownership of shipped digital products. • Demonstrated track record of leading design on large-scale programs, 0-1 product launches and navigating senior stakeholder groups. • Expertise in user research, journey mapping, wireframing, and rapid prototyping, utilising lean approaches to validate desirability, viability, and feasibility. • Fluency in designing for AI and data-driven products -comfortable exploring how AI can enhance the user experience and utilising AI-enabled design tools in your daily workflow. • Experience bringing a human-centered design and innovation mindset into organizations at scale, particularly in environments undergoing rapid economic or digital transformation. • Strong grounding in accessibility, inclusive design, and responsive/adaptive design across devices and contexts. • Experience or experiments in designing conversational interfaces: AI chat, task-oriented assistants, voice, or multi-modal experiences - with a clear understanding of how these differ fundamentally from traditional design. Professional Skills • KSA/Middle East design experience (or strong experience having developed products for Riyadh/Middle East) • Skilled at operating and building relationships with executive stakeholders, and confident in driving conversations at the intersection of design, technology, and business strategy. • Experience with consultative selling and senior client leadership-diagnosing client needs, co-creating solutions, and building trusted-advisor relationships. • Strong workshop facilitation skills - able to run Define workshops, opportunity validation sessions, and concept generation activities that generate client alignment and forward momentum within hours. • Articulate design rationale clearly to both technical and executive audiences, welcome critique as a tool for better work, and connect design decisions to business and customer outcomes. • Passionate about building the local design community and serving as an external voice for Thoughtworks' design practice in the Middle East. • Design builder and advisor mindset, with a strong lean toward working within multidisciplinary teams comprising strong local capability and global experts. • Brings a curious, open mindset to challenging established ways of working, energized by the opportunity to help build Thoughtworks from an early stage in the region. Other Things To Know Working Model Hybrid – 3 days on-site/week Learning & Development There is no one-size-fits-all career path at Thoughtworks: however you want to develop your career is entirely up to you. But we also balance autonomy with the strength of our cultivation culture. This means your career is supported by interactive tools, numerous development programs and teammates who want to help you grow. We see value in helping each other be our best and that extends to empowering our employees in their career journeys. Responsible Use of AI in Recruitment At Thoughtworks, we use AI tools to support our recruitment team with administrative tasks such as drafting communications, scheduling interviews and writing job descriptions. Crucially, our AI tools do not screen, assess, rank or make hiring decisions. Every application is reviewed by our team and all selection decisions are made exclusively by our interviewers and hiring managers. We are committed to fairness and responsible AI. We actively manage our AI systems by testing, monitoring for biased outcomes and implementing mitigation measures. We hold our third-party vendors to these same high standards through a rigorous governance process. For additional information, please see our full Thoughtworks AI Policy for Recruitment. About Thoughtworks Thoughtworks is a dynamic and inclusive community of bright and supportive colleagues who are revolutionizing tech. As a leading technology consultancy, we’re pushing boundaries through our purposeful and impactful work. For 30+ years, we’ve delivered extraordinary impact together with our clients by helping them solve complex business problems with technology as the differentiator. Join Thoughtworks at the beginning of our next chapter in the Middle East. You'll have the opportunity to work on ambitious AI, data, and digital transformation challenges, wh